Review: Coffeehouses and Culture

Reviewed Work(s): The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse by
Brian Cowan; Eighteenth-Century Coffee-House Culture by Markman Ellis
Review by: Nat Zappiah
Source: Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 4 (December 2007), pp. 671-677
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/hlq.2007.70.4.671
Accessed: 16-11-2016 05:42 UTC
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review essay
Coffeehouses and Culture
Nat Zappiah

Brian Cowan
The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse
new haven and london: yale university press, 2005. xii + 364 pages
isbn: 9780300106664
Markman Ellis, editor
Eighteenth-Century Coffee-House Culture
london: chatto and pickering, 2006. 4 vols., 1,840 pages
isbn: 9781851968299

those writing the history of the coffeehouse have associated it with
multiple intellectual currentsincluding the once subversive notions of democratic
participation, scientific inquiry, and capitalism. They have also suggested that certain
literary tropes (for example, satire and criticism) found their home or even their origin
in the coffeehouse. The subversive cast of these ideas and tropes has only the faintest
echo in todays modern coffee franchises, where peppy baristas produce specialty
drinks. Indeed, as Markman Ellis laments in his recent book, The Coffee House, In the
lactification of the coffee-house, the branded chains have eviscerated the bitter
flavours of the coffee-house history. The heritage with which Starbucks prefers to
identify is the romance of the coffee bean, rather than the less palatable coffee-house
history of gossip, scandal and sedition.1 It is this buried, bitter history that both Ellis
and Brian Cowan ably resurrect in the works under review.
Ellis and Cowan have several overarching views in common. Both are more
concerned with the evolution of the coffeehouse as a historical spacethat is to say,
an agent of historical changethan with the commodity of coffee itself. In contrast to
other studies exploring the impact of the bean and the beverage, they see coffee itself as
1. Markman Ellis, The Coffee House: A Cultural History (London, 2004), 258.

huntington library quarterly | vol. 70, no. 4

671

Pp. 671677. 2007 by Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. issn 0018-7895 | e-issn 1544-399x. All rights reserved.
For permission to photocopy or reproduce article content, consult the University of California Press Rights and Permissions
website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/hlq.2007.70.4.671.

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672

nat zappiah

somewhat beside the point. Tea and gin in fact quickly replaced coffee as the beverage
of choice after the opening of the Canton trade to China in 1717. Indeed, in contrast to
the consumption of gin and tea, coffee drinking itself was less compelling and needed
to win adherents with the accoutrements of coffeehouse sociability. Cowan and Ellis
both point out that coffee was (and is) an acquired taste; its bitter flavor proved barely
palatable at first, until the addictive properties of caffeine took hold. Gin and tea
proved just as addictive, yet failed to produce the equivalent social space. Thus, Cowan
and Ellis argue that the coffeehousenot coffee itselfbrought wide swaths of early
modern English society together in an unprecedented way.
But did the seeds of modernity lie within the not-yet-modern coffeehouse? Was
it a place where the middling sort came together to participate in forming the public
sphere? Did coffeehouse culture serve as an early modern Western (and particularly
English) invention, or was it in fact an adaptation of an early modern Islamic (particularly Ottoman) cultural practice? Ellis and Cowan agree that the British coffeehouse
served as a dynamic social space that played a seminal role in the culture of early modern Britain during a time of civil unrest and political uncertainty.


In The Social Life of Coffee, Brian Cowan re-envisions whiggish interpretations of the
British coffeehouse in relation to the growth of a capitalist England. In his introduction
he states that the rise of coffee did not inaugurate the creation of the modern world;
coffee and coffeehouses were received and popularized by an old regime and preindustrial society (p. 3). Focusing on the fractious historical period 16001720,
between Elizabeth and George I, Cowan takes on the dominant and coordinate assumptions about the consumer revolution and the public sphere with respect to the
coffeehouse. Over the course of eight chapters, he follows the coffeehouse on its evolution from a peripheral curiosity to a ubiquitous social entity, and from a raucous, uncontrolled territory to a closely monitored civilizing space. Over the course of this
three-part study (Coffee: From Curiosity to Commodity [part 1]; Inventing the
Coffeehouse [part 2]; Civilizing the Coffeehouses [part 3]), Cowan demonstrates
that the coffeehouse never followed a linear trajectory toward modernityin fact,
its demise coincided with what are generally regarded as more modern politicaleconomic trends and circumstances.
Situating his story within the post-revisionist camp, Cowan offers an account
of the rise of coffee and coffeehouses in which their success is not assumed but explained (p. 4). Indeed, his title apparently alludes to a study by Arjun Appadurai, The
Social Life of Things, which took to task long-held scholarly assumptions about commodities. In his introduction, Appadurai addressed the perceived direct association
between manufactured goods and political economy:
In most modern analyses of economy (outside anthropology), the
meaning of the term commodity has narrowed to reflect only one part

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review essay | coffeehouses and culture

673

of the heritage of Marx and the early political economists. That is, in
most contemporary uses, commodities are special kinds of manufactured goods (or services), which are associated only with capitalist
modes of production.2
Thus, Appadurai argues, material goods cannot be considered apart from social values. Similarly, Cowans study moves away from a functionalist approach and situates
early modern commodities in relationship to the subjective motives of coffeehouse
consumers.
Cowan highlights the four dominant approaches of scholars who have sought to
explain the success of imported products to western Europe during this period, including neoclassical economics, social emulation theories, functionalist explanations,
and cultural impulses. Functionalism and neoclassical economics tend to look closely
at the consumer as a rational entity responding to the laws of supply and demand.
These approaches have merit; the very decline of coffee consumption in England can
be traced to the increasingly favorable price of tea in the early eighteenth century. Similarly, as Sidney Mintz has argued, stimulants such as coffee, which increased the productivity of the growing workforce of modern capitalism, in turn fueled demand and
production. Cowan turns away from these approaches, preferring emulation (or
trickle-down) theories, and argues that an ideological bentor as he calls it, an
ideal of characterespoused by an overlooked and much maligned avant-garde
community, the English virtuosos, ushered coffee and coffeehouses into early modern
English culture. Cowan views the virtuosi as a somewhat marginal group of elite English gentlemen that in many ways defies classification as either modern or pre-modern.
They were engaged in the recovery of knowledge from the classical world and collected
rarities from around the globe. Their inquiries sometimes bordered on the frivolous
and were frequently derided as such. Indeed, satirists such as Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and Thomas Shadwell owed some of their popularity to their ridicule of the
pretensions of the virtuosi. Cowan defends these English gentlemen from both the
seventeenth-century satirists and the later historians who shared their disdain. He
credits the virtuosi with championing the scientific method, even though, with hindsight, their methods of gathering and testing data seem superficial. Their role in advancing and producing scientific perspectives is indisputable, he suggests, because the
curiosity that the virtuosi espoused help set in motion the more structured pursuit of
knowledge.
The virtuosi also played an important role in the adoption of coffee, ushering an
unfamiliar and exotic commodity into English culture, but their role has been largely
forgotten. As Cowan argues, by the late 1600s, virtuoso curiosity about the exotic was
no longer mere idle speculation, and commodities like coffee were no longer just topics fit for cabinet banter. As the strange had become familiar, so had the early centrality
2. Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge,
1986), 7.

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of virtuosity to the English understanding of coffee now become peripheral (p. 29).
While Cowan traces coffee from its introduction by the virtuosi to a widely consumed
commodity in the period before the Restoration, he pays close attention to the local
variations: the tastes reflected in medical literature and drug culture, as well as the maneuvering by an overseas merchant community attuned to the demands of English
coffee drinkers. His excellent chapter on early modern drug culture, incidentally,
reveals much about the nature of seventeenth-century medicine. As established
physicians in greater numbers endorsed coffee drinking, approving its relatively
benign qualities, consumption increased and the international market, ever flexible,
responded.
Central to Cowans study, though, is the coffeehouse. It is here, he argues, that
the virtuosi [were] quite literally [brought] face to face with the commercial, and the
consumer, cultures of a city that was rapidly becoming the center of a global trading
network (p. 114). Thus, the uneven mix of new and old, pre-modern and early modern, shared territory in the coffeehouse. Here consumer orientalism had its origins in
the old regime of carnival, . . . but it was also the first apparition of a new capitalist
mode . . . The consumer culture exemplified by the coffeehouse was both traditional
and modern at the same time (p. 119). Specifically, the auctions of rare items and the
display of exotic goods (for example, a rhino at the Belle Savage Inn in 1684) evinced
the mixing of modern and early modernnot simply the rise of one and the decline of
the other. In his chapter Exotic Fantasies and Commercial Anxieties, Cowan most
convincingly challenges the dominant consumer revolution paradigm.
Similarly, Cowan reexamines, in relationship to the coffeehouse, the public
sphere as Habermas defined it: a place where individuals take part in an open discussion that is not orchestrated, controlled, or manipulated by an overarching hierarchy.
The coffeehouse served Habermas as a key setting for the rise of popular discourse and
modern notions of public space. Both Cowan and Ellis reject the trajectory that this
view implies. After the Restoration, Cowan notes, coffeehouses became the prime target for royalist attacks against the dissemination of seditious rumors or false news
among the general population (p. 147). But Cowan argues that rather than looking at
the coffeehouse simply as a foreshadowing of modern conflicts between the state and
civil society, it is perhaps more useful to observe the coffeehouse as an important new
site in which the negotiation of early modern power took place (p. 151).
In part 3, Cowan closely examines how various state regimes dealt with the
coffeehouse. The Revolution Settlement of 1688 did not lead to the celebration of the
role of the coffeehouse in British politics. Wariness toward coffeehouses persisted
across the courts of Charles, James, William, and Anne. Yet, none of these regimes was
in a strong enough position to ban coffeehouses, even as propaganda spread through
these institutions.
The extremes of the political rhetoric, including subversive rumors and propaganda, were eventually controlled not by any government but by the body politic itself.
In his last chapter, Cowan points out that for many [the coffeehouse] remained a force
to be feared rather than embraced (p. 224). Just as the introduction of coffee raised

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concerns among consumers pertaining to health and sexual mores, so did the coffeehouse provoke uncertainty over questions of morality, gender, and masculinity. It is in
relationship to these questions that Cowan most usefully unsettles the picture of a
public sphere. How far did the privacy of the household reach into the public coffeehouse? How much would politeness and gentlemanly values restrain the exchange
among coffeehouse patrons? How did feminine or masculine spheres interact or conflict? Finally, how would civilized society shape the coffeehouse? Cowans assessment of the coffeehouse shows the contested boundaries between the private world
and the public sphere, state institutions and the body politic, and early modern and
modern periods.


Markman Elliss four-volume edition of coffeehouse texts similarly blurs some of the
assessments of the institution based on trajectories toward modernity. His masterful
selection and arrangement of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources colorfully
illustrate the rich legacy of the institution. Like Cowan, Ellis sees the coffeehouse as
much more than a commercial enterprise. The evidence he citessampled in four volumes of Restoration and eighteenth-century satire, comedic plays, and science and
history writingsillustrates novel varieties of English sociability. Elliss general introduction covers much of the same historiographic territory as Cowan does, citing the
Habermasian debate and the whiggish views of the coffeehouse, but it is in the introduction to each volume that Ellis stakes out more specific territory. In volume 1,
Restoration Satire, Ellis argues that the debate over coffeehouses shaped innovative
forms of satire emerging in the early modern period:
The distinctive formal feature of these Restoration satirical burlesques on
the coffee-house is the stage between the vulgar and undignified representation of coffee-house manners and conversation, and the adoption
of a mock form derived from the discourse of authority, such as the petition, complaint, news report, travel journal, character or dialogue. These
hybrid forms defy easy categorization: perceived within a classical literary matrix they bear some allegiance to forms of Menippean and Varronian satire; while at times they also adopt innovative satiric forms like the
hudibrastic or the complaint. (1:xlvii).
These satirical pieces are particularly useful in penetrating the mindset of early
modern Britons. A Broad-side Against Coffee; Or, the Marriage of the Turk (1672) reveals how Londoners came to question the supposedly culturally innovative nature of
the coffeehouse. Ellis also highlights misunderstandings in earlier interpretations of
textsfor example, of The Womens Petition Against Coffee (1674). Whereas the
piece has been used to demonstrate changes in gender roles that coffeehouses facilitated, Ellis calls attention to its satirical nature: The satire is directed against the cultural reformation that coffee-houses were understood to have introduced in London

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society: the men who congregate in the coffee-houses are associated with the supposedly feminine attributes of talking and gossiping (2:109). Thus, he concludes that the
petition had little to do with the actual experience of women; nor was it likely produced by a woman.
Elliss second volume explores the role of coffee-women in eighteenth-century
London. As the coffeehouse matured during this period, he suggests, women still occupied an anomalous position within this spacenot that they were officially excluded but that social hierarchies and gender boundaries still existed within an early
modern mindset, as Cowan also argues. Still, so-called biographies of coffee-women,
particularly prostitutes and other women who defied societal conventions, abound
during this periodincluding The Life and Character of Moll King (1747) and
Marriage-a-la-Mode (1747). Ellis urges, however, that these biographies say much
more about the perceived vulgar and disorderly nature of coffeehouse discourse than
about the lives of women.
In Elliss third volume, on the drama, he makes the case for viewing coffeehouses as the impetus for the professionalization of literary criticism. The return of
theaters in London in the Restoration period coincided with the proliferation of coffeehouses, and many of them sprouted close to theatersthus inviting communities of
critics and wits to cast their judgment on all the new plays and poems produced or
published in London (3:ix). Elliss texts trace the increasing overlap between coffeehouses, satirical plays ridiculing them, and professional criticism of these plays
debated within the coffeehouses themselves.
Finally, in volume 4, Ellis traces the seeds of scientific inquiry within the coffeehouse, a development that Cowan also considers. Open-ended conversation, joined
with the openness of the coffeehouse space, stimulated broader inquiry and debate.
Like Cowan, Ellis pays the virtuosi their due, but he also sees the actual space of the
coffeehouse as conducive to nascent scientific method: In coffee-house discussions,
the men of science could meet and debate with their opponents: hypotheses proved
true in the coffee-house could be proved anywhere (4:11). In this volume, Ellis goes
further than Cowan in suggesting that the coffeehouse served as a repository for
modernity and new forms of social organization. Indeed, his selection of texts in this
section, with their intricate and often methodical descriptions of coffeeincluding
medical studies of its effects and natural histories of the beveragepoint to innovations in both public and scientific discourse. Understanding coffees properties became
a premier occupation of coffeehouse patrons, who both debated and printed their
opinions and experiments. As Ellis aptly notes, Attending the coffee-house, in short,
was an important tool of experimental research, akin to a peer-review system, a research centre, and a symposium (4:x). Thus, Ellis locates more modern innovations
within the coffeehouse than does Cowan, and seems to see it as a crucial transitional
and transformational space.

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review essay | coffeehouses and culture

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Overall, these works successfully complicate the dual revolutions of consumerism
and the public sphere that fully emerged in the eighteenth century. Cowans strongest
chapters fully immerse the reader in the variable world of the early modern consumer,
while Elliss edition leads to a cogent and nuanced picture of the public sphere. Both
authors have made important contributions to our understanding not only of early
modern British culture but of the rest of Europe and the Americas as well. After all,
even after the decline of Englands coffeehouses, cafs proliferated everywhere
Rome, Paris, Vienna, Boston. As they argue, the spread of coffeehouses was a consequence not only of English importation but also of exportation to the rest of Europe.
It is here, though, that these works must be challenged. While England invented
and exported a certain kind of coffeehouse, the culture that characterized the institution originated in the Islamic world. Indeed, English merchants and virtuosi first observed the proliferation of cafs across Istanbul. It was this coffeehouse cultureand
its alluring emphasis on lively, open-ended conversationthat English importers
sought to emulate. They did not, in fact, invent this social space, but adopted and embraced foreign tastes as well as products. When the origins of coffeehouse conventions
are closely traced, the dynamic nature of Ottoman society takes its place alongside
contemporary cultural changes in western Europe.
Scholars have recently revisited the consumption of beverages such as chocolate, which also depended on imports and changes in the global economy. In the early
modern world, chocolate, like coffee, was an acquired taste, surrounded by very particular social conventions that had originated among Mesoamerican elites. Also like coffee, chocolate was a bitter beverage that required extensive mixing and frothing to be
palatable. Particular accoutrements for mixing chocolate also became staples, for example, among the elites in Spain. In her study Tasting Empire, Marcy Norton argues
that the Spanish adoption of this foreign (that is, elite Aztec) beverage played a role in
the introduction of coffee and tea to western Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.3 In further studies, attention to the internalization of Mesoamerican,
Islamic, and Asian tastes will further dislodge the assumptions about the public sphere
and consumer revolution that Cowan and Ellis have impressively challenged.
university of california, santa cruz

3. Marcy Norton, Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican
Aesthetics, American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (June 2006), 66667.

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